If you happen to stumble across a vintage hand-painted sign on the side of a building some night, and it suddenly comes to life with colorful, animated light, you’re probably witnessing the work of Portland-based light artist and experiential director, Craig Winslow.
He’s created work for Nike, Adobe, the Portland Trail Blazers and film director Tim Burton. With Burton he helped create a dazzling series of illuminated installations at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas.
But his passion is a project he calls “light capsules.” The capsules are intricately mapped projections that resurrect ghost signs, the faded historic advertisements painted on the sides of buildings. Winslow says his project title is a play on words. “It’s as if we’re surrounded by hidden time capsules” that are only revealed with light.
Winslow has created nearly 40 light capsules in cities around the world. Usually these creations last one night only — vanishing by sunrise. But Winslow recently premiered his first permanent U.S. light capsule in Astoria, Oregon, restoring some of that city’s hand-painted signs to their turn-of-the-century glory.
We visited Winslow in his Portland studio to talk about his fascination with ghost signs and the art behind them.
OPB’s Eric Slade: What do you love about these ghost signs?
Winslow: What I love seeing in these old ghost signs are all the letter forms that you find … every letter is different. So as I’ve been digitizing them, I can’t just pick a typeface or I can’t just pick a letter and copy and paste it. I have to hand vectorize every single letter because they’re all hand-painted.
And I love the aesthetic of specifically palimpsest ghost signs, which is a ghost sign that has multiple, more, layers to it. It’s called a palimpsest. You see multiple layers of time simultaneously. They were painted with pigments, lead-based paint, that are quite toxic, but they’ve lasted a hundred years. So what you’re looking at is not a wall from an ad 10 years ago. This is from, like, 1916. And I think that itself is pretty humbling.
Slade: What makes you want to create light capsules?
Winslow: I do it because I have the ability to do it and I have a love for it. And I love not only the sign painting aspect of it and this old lettering and craft, but also the technology side of things and blending those together.
Every single light capsule I’ve done has started an amazing conversation with people that come out to see these in real life and it inspires curiosity about…trying to find and preserve other ghost signs.
Winslow’s Astoria light capsule turns on at dusk and off around 11 p.m. But describing it in words doesn’t do it justice — stop by his installation next time you’re in town, at 254 9th St. in downtown Astoria.